GNOME has, for some reason or another,
always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is
able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release,
Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the
venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series,
and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release,
Debian 7 ‘wheezy’.

During the final stages of wheezy’s development, it was pointed out that
the first install CD image would not longer hold all of the required packages
to install a full GNOME desktop environment. There was lots of discussion
surrounding this bug or fact, and there were two major reactions to it. The
Debian GNOME team rebuilt some key packages so they would be compressed using
xz instead of gzip, saving the few megabytes that
were needed to squeeze everything in the first CD. In parallel, the tasksel
maintainer decided
switching to Xfce as default
desktop was another obvious fix. This change, unannounced and two days before
the freeze, was very contested and spurred the usual massive debian-devel
threads. In the end, and after a few default desktop flip flops, it was agreed
that GNOME would remain as the default for the already frozen wheezy release,
and this issue would be revisited later on during jessie’s
development.

And indeed, some months ago, Xfce was again reinstated as Debian’s
default desktop for jessie as announced:

Change default desktop to xfce.
This will be re-evaluated before jessie is frozen. The evaluation will
start around the point of DebConf (August 2014). If at that point gnome
looks like a better choice, it’ll go back as the default.
Some criteria for that choice will include:
* Popcon numbers for gnome on jessie. If gnome installations continue to
rise fast enough despite xfce being the default (compared with, say
kde installations), then we’ll know that users prefer gnome.
Currently we have no data about how many users would choose gnome when
it’s not the default. Part of the reason for switching to xfce now
is to get such data.
* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.
* How well the UI works for both new and existing users. Gnome 3
seems to be adding back many gnome 2 features that existing users
expect, as well as making some available via addons. If it feels
comfortable to gnome 2 (and xfce) users, that would go a long way
toward switching back to it as the default. Meanwhile, Gnome 3 is also
breaking new ground in its interface; if the interface seems more
welcoming to new users, or works better on mobile devices, etc, that
would again point toward switching back.
* Whatever size constraints exist for CD or other images at the time.
--
Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring.
Why don’t you write a story about monads instead?

Suffice to say that the Debian GNOME team participants have never been
thrilled about how the whole issue is being handled, and we’ve been wondering
if we should be doing anything about it, or just move along and enjoy
the smaller amount of bug reports against GNOME packages that this change would
bring us, if it finally made it through to the final release. During our real
life meet-ups in FOSDEM and the systemd+GNOME sprint
in Antwerp, most members of the team did feel Debian would not be
delivering a graphical environment with the polish we think our users deserve,
and decided we at least should try to convince the rest of the Debian project
and our users that Debian will be best suited by shipping GNOME 3.12 by
default. Power users, of course, can and know how to get around this default
and install KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE or whatever other choice they have. For
the average user, though, we think we should be shipping GNOME by default, and
tasksel should revert the above commit again. Some of our reasons are:

Accessibility: GNOME continues to be the only free desktop
environment that provides full accessibility coverage, right from login screen.
While it’s true GNOME 3.0 was lacking in many areas, and GNOME 3.4 (which we
shipped in wheezy) was just barely acceptable thanks to some last minute GDM
fixes, GNOME 3.12 should have ironed out all of the issues and our non-expert
understanding is that a11y support is now on par with what GNOME 2.30 from
squeeze offered.

Downstream health: The number of active members in the
team taking care of GNOME in Debian is around 5-10 persons, while it is 1-2 in
the case of Xfce. Being the default desktop draws a lot of attention (and bug
reports) that only a bigger team might have the resources to handle.

Upstream health: While GNOME is still committed to its
time-based release schedule and ships new versions every 6 months, Xfce
upstream is, unfortunately, struggling a bit more to keep up with new plumbing
technology. Only very recently it has regained support to suspend/hibernate via
logind, or support for Bluez 5.x, for example.

Community: GNOME is one of the biggest free software
projects, and is lucky to have created an ecosystem of developers, documenters,
translators and users that interact regularly in a live social community. Users
and developers gather in hackfests and big, annual conferences like
GUADEC, the
Boston Summit, or
GNOME.Asia. Only KDE has a comparable
community, the rest of the free desktop projects don’t have the userbase or
humanpower to sustain communities like this.

Localization: Localization is more extensive and complete
in GNOME. Xfce has 18 languages above 95% of coverage, and 2 at 100%
(excluding English). GNOME has 28 languages above 95%, 9 of them being
complete (excluding English).

Documentation: Documentation coverage is extensive in
GNOME, with most of the core applications providing localized, up to date and
complete manuals, available in an accessible format via the Help reader.

Integration: The level of integration between components
is very high in GNOME. For example, instant messaging, agenda and accessibility
components are an integral part of the desktop. GNOME is closely integrated to
NetworkManager, PulseAudio, udisks and upower so that the user has access to
all the plumbing in a single place. GNOME also integrates easily with online
accounts and services (ownCloud, Google, MS Exchange…).

Hardware: GNOME 3.12 will be one of the few desktop
environments to support HiDPI displays, now very common on some laptop models.
Lack of support for HiDPI means non-technical users will get an unreadable
desktop by default, and no hints on how to fix that.

Security: GNOME is more secure. There are no processes
launched with root permissions on the user’s session. All everyday operations
(package management, disk partitioning and formatting, date/time
configuration…) are accomplished through PolicyKit wrappers.

Privacy: One of the latest focuses of GNOME development is
improving privacy,
and work is being done to make it easy to run GNOME applications in isolated
containers, integrate Tor seamlessly in the desktop experience, better disk
encryption support and other features that should make GNOME a more secure
desktop environment for end users.

Popularity: One of the metrics discussed by the tasksel
change proponents mentioned popcon
numbers. 8 months after the desktop change,
Xfce does not seem to have made a dent on install numbers.
The Debian GNOME team doesn’t feel popcon’s data is any better than a
random online poll though, as it’s an opt-in service which the vast majority
of users don’t enable.

systemd embracing: One of the reasons to switch to Xfce
was that it didn’t depend on systemd. But now that systemd is the default, that
shouldn’t be a problem. Also given ConsoleKit is deprecated and dead upstream,
KDE and Xfce are switching or are planning to switch to systemd/logind.

Adaptation: Debian forced a big desktop change with the
wheezy release, switching from the traditional GNOME 2.x to the new GNOME Shell
environment. Switching again would mean more adaptation for uses when they’ve
had two years to experience GNOME 3.4. Furthermore, GNOME 3.12 means two years
of improvements and polishing to GNOME 3.4, which should help with some of the
rough edges found in the GNOME release shipped with wheezy.

Administration: GNOME is easy to administrate. All the
default settings can be defined by administrators, and mandatory settings can
be forced to users, which is required in some companies and administrations;
Xfce cannot do that. The close integration with freedesktop components
(systemd, NM, PulseAudio…) also gives access to specific and useful
administration tools.

In short, we think defaulting to GNOME is the best option for the Debian
release, and in contrast, shipping Xfce as the default desktop could mean
delivering a desktop experience that has some incomplete or rough edges, and
not on par with Debian quality standards for a stable release. We believe
tasksel should again revert the change and be uploaded as soon as possible, in
order to get people testing images with GNOME the sooner the better, with the
freeze only two months away.

We would also like that in the future, changes of
this nature will not be announced in a git commit log, but widely discussed in
debian-project and the other usual development/decision channels, like the
change of init system happened recently. We will, whichever the final decision
is, continue to package GNOME with great care to ensure our users get the best
possible desktop experience Debian can offer.

I've been in A Coruña for this year's GUADEC since Tuesday night, and it
rocked. I did a late registration after my first week at
Collabora, which is sponsoring my
stay here.

I came one day early to participate, as Debian's representative, at the
yearly GNOME Advisory Board meeting, for the first time. It was a positive
experience, which helped me get a grasp of the “big picture” of what the GNOME
Foundation does. I also had the pleasure of visiting
Igalia's awesome offices in the city,
and puting faces to many names during the meeting.

I presented an overview of Debian's relation to GNOME, how our packaging
team works and what are our goals and biggest problems as a GNOME downstream.
We stirred some good debate as some other Advisory Board members share part
of our problems. I should be posting a summary of what happened there for
debian-project@ldo as soon as I have the time to scribble it.

I've met with GNOME Hispano people I hadn't seen since 2004 or 2006 in the
best case, and catched up with many of them. I've also met many
GPUL members I had know for over a decade
via IRC, but never had met in person, and it was about time. And of course,
I've got to known a good number of my new workmates at Collabora, and had fun
with them around the conference, the beach and the numerous post-conference
events.

Last, but not least, I ended up participating in the
GNOME Olympics,
substituting Rodrigo in Team B
“Core Dumped”, along with Stefano, John, Bastien, Chema and Adam. WE WON, not
thanks to me, but the statistics shine: I've won all FreeFA World Cups I've
played :P so here's a PROtip: if you want to win next year, be sure to be
my team mate, and more importantly, be sure Adam is not your rival. :)

Unfortunately, I'm only attending the core days so tonight I'll
be flying back to Madrid on my way home in València. See you next year!
A Coruña is a city that has impressed me quite a bit, and I'm looking forward
to coming back for some more standard vacation at some point. :)

It feels like I'm sitting in a roller-coaster wagon. There's probably
too much change going on for me to assimilate naturally. In
particular:

I just wrapped up (well, mostly) one of the toughest Uni semestres. I had
to deal with lots of very time consuming assignments, and then the usual
round of final exams. Even if this semester I got the best marks in my
journey (or shall we say Via Crucis) through University, I still
managed to fail one exam, for the Advanced Networks subject, which is
quite annoying, given I got high marks (even the highest in one case) in
other subjects I really don't master at all. In any case, this is the end
of the pain. The only thing that's left is just one exam and a project
based on GNU/Linux technologies which will basically mean formatting for
prettyness the sysadmin docs we've been collecting at the office during
the last few years. This effort will be nothing to what I've been doing
during the past 18 months, so I'm really relieved to have it past me
already.

Getting rid of studies comes just two weeks before a big change in my
professional career. Friday was my last day at the
Institut Tecnològic d'Informàtica, after
five and a half fantastic years working with awesome people in a very
friendly atmosphere. I've learned a great deal, and taking this decision
wasn't easy at all. I leave lots of good friends behind, people I really
love, and tomorrow will be difficult to not have them around me. I wish my
ITI ex-workmates the best of luck in these difficult times for everyone in
Spain and specially in the Valencian Country with the massive cuts going
on. I feel the timing for this jump couldn't be better.

Tomorrow, when I get ready to go for work, I won't be leaving home at
all, instead I will just sit where I am right now, at home, and log into some
corporate IRC server. Tomorrow I'll be joining
Collabora, and I'm a mix
of excited, curious and happy about this incredible opportunity. Thanks to
Sjoerd for nags, I might not be
writing this if it wasn't for you!

When I was first approached about this, I thought Collabora was a small
company. But as I looked more into it, I discovered that's not longer the
case, there's many more people than I imagined working there (here!), and
was delighted to see I knew many of them, and many other are well known
members of the major Free Sofware communities. I'll be joining the
sysadmin team to work closely with
Jo Shields. See you tomorrow,
folks. :)

This opportunity to work from home is godsend, given the third bit of
change that'll be happening soon: sometime in late September, Maria and I
should join the ranks of first-time parents, following the baby boom wave
surrounding us. While you can imagine we're really happy about this, we're
also freaking out because this is going to happen in just two months
and a half, and weeks go by really fast lately. So yeah, being able to be at
home with this really small baby will be a big bonus for the incredible
experience we're about to enjoy. We've been both busy with other stuff,
but during the summer we should be focusing on preparing the baby's
arrival. There's a whole lot to do!

Expect my Debian and other Free Software activities to get a hit, of
course. :) If I am normally sleep-deprived, this is going to be the next
level.

Users of Debian sid will have noticed: the final (and
interesting) bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it
does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week.

3.2 → 3.4 hasn't been as complicated as the previous
horrible transition,
but still had some complications due to Cogl/Clutter incompatibilities.
Other than that, our major problem has been manpower, but this isn't new
for many other Debian teams. We've also seen new incarnations of
“Linux-only technology is now mandatory” which makes our lives a bit more
miserable due to kfreebsd-* and hurd-i386, but
for now we've still been able to dodge it. It seems wheezy+1 will
be fun in that regard though, and we might need to take drastic
approaches.

If all goes well and the current lot (GNOME Shell, Control Center,
Settings daemon, Mutter...) transitions without additional problems, we
should be wrapping up our transitions for wheezy with Evolution and
friends (currently sitting in experimental), and hopefully GDM 3.4.

As we get many questions regarding the status of GDM in
Debian, let's add a short note on this. Packaging GDM, at least in its
current upstream form, is not a matter of unpacking a new tarball and
editing debian/changelog. When Joss works on a new major version, the
amount of tweaking to break away from stuff that works on other distros
but is not so simple in Debian is outstanding (see, for example, the current
unfinished work for GDM 3.2 in our SVN repo). In our case, to
handle our GDM defaults, we even need changes to the underlying configuration
system, dconf. This evidently takes some effort to do, and unfortunately our
GDM expert has had little time for Debian lately, but we're confident we'll
end up with a GDM in wheezy that is on par with Debian standards.

We are, as always, reachable at #debian-gnome in the OFTC
IRC network. Have fun!

I know there's lots of polish and improvements to some of the major rough
edges in GNOME 3.2, but I think that of all changes in this release, Epiphany
really stands out, as you can see in blog posts by
Xan
and Diego.

Work to bring
GNOME 3.4 to Debianwheezy users has been underway for a few weeks already, and some bits
and pieces have been hitting unstable since the tarballs were
released a pair of days ago. We still need more base work to be done before
some exciting components like GNOME Shell can hit our archive, and we want to
fix as many
FTBFS with GLib 2.32
bugs as possible before pushing it to unstable, but all in all, hopefully this
time, shepherding a major GNOME release to Debian testing won't be
as painful
as it was not so long ago. However, we have already identified some fun bits
involving clutter, cogl and mutter in our initial analysis, but nothing that
hopefully can't be dealt with in a civilised way.

As always, if you think you can help us, we're reachable at #debian-gnome
at OFTC!

Removing alsaconf
was one of the very few rewarding moments of these ten years of taking care
of ALSA in Debian.

Not everyone agreed back then, and we still get some retaliation. :)

Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:59:31 +0100
From: <CENSORED>
To: jordi@debian.org
Subject: sabotage!
the removing of alsaconf without working(!) alternatives was (AND IS!) an
act of sabotage against millions of debian/alsa - users who needs stable
productive systems
you and all those proponents of removing this still needed alsaconf - program
will have to take the responsibility in front of an (us-) court for damages in
millions of dollars - amounts (lost man hours) all over the world
only a short while and we will have enough sponsors and witnesses around the
globe (and a very specialised, international labouring bureau of advocates) to
go to the court for prosecution.
we will not tolerate such an betray ("stable"? - do you believe, we're
fools??!!) against broad sections of the population and against the spirit of
free software!
it will be intresting to investigate, in whoms interests you've done so and
who the beneficiaries are ...
L.B.
conductor, publicist, whistleblower

When you read this,
GNOME Shell 3.2 will
(hopefully!) have finally transitioned to Debian’s testing suite.

Planet GNOME readers might think
Debian now has outdated versions of software even in their development
versions, or the distribution’s development marches at glacial pace.
Wheezy GNOME users will finally have a Shell that matches the rest
of their GNOME components, something that works with the
Shell extensions website and much
less problems and limitations compared to 3.0.2.

The reality is that GNOME 3.2’s packaging was quite ready back when it
was released in late September, but a number of not-so-desirable situations
held GNOME Shell from transitioning to testing until today, four months
later. So, what happened?

TL;DR: transitioning from GNOME 2 → GNOME 3 is not so easy if you
want to keep testing in a sane state, and when you need to deal with
dozens of indirectly related packages, for more than 10 architectures… but it
shouldn’t take nearly a full year, either…

Let’s go back to the last months of 2010. Debian squeeze is in
very deep freeze, and the release team and many Debian developers are
focusing on squashing as many release critical bugs as they can, in order to
make Debian 6.0 the great release it ended up being. The GNOME project has
recently delayed the big launch of
GNOME 3.0 again, until
March 2011; Debian has already settled on GNOME 2.28 for its release,
although it will end up cherry-picking many updates from the 2.30 release
modules.

With most of the stabilization work being done, many Debian GNOME team
members were at that time working on packaging very early versions of what
would end up being GNOME 3.0 technology: GTK+3.0, GNOME Shell, Mutter… and
some brave users even tried to use it via the experimental archive.

On February 6th, Debian 6.0 was released, and soon after, on April 6th,
GNOME made a huge step forward with the much anticipated
release of GNOME 3.0.
At that time, Debian developers were busy breaking unstable as
much as they could, as it’s tradition on the weeks following a major
release, and the Debian GNOME team was able to start moving some GNOME 3.0
libraries (those which were parallel-installable with their GTK+2.0
versions) to unstable.

However, moving the bulk of GNOME 3.0 to unstable wasn’t so easy. When
you start doing that, you need to be sure you’re ready to have all affected
packages in a “transitionable” state as soon as possible, to minimise the
chances of blocking transitions of unrelated packages via the dependencies
they pick up with rebuilds. All the packages involved in a transition need
to be ready to go in the same “testing run”, for all supported
architectures. When you’re dealing with dozens of GNOME source packages at
the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or worse, introduce
incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated packages, things get
hairy, and
you need a plan.

So, Joss outlined what a sane
approach to this monster transition could look like. The amount of work to
do was what we call “fun” on #debian-gnome. In a nutshell, we
had to deal with quite a few transitions, starting with
having a newer version of libnotify in unstable, and a pre-requisite for
that was making sure all the packages using libnotify1 were ready to use the
source-incompatible libnotify4, and this meant preparing patches and NMUs
for many of our packages, as well as many others not under our control.

Before starting a controlled transition like this one, we had to get an
ACK from the release team, who was busy enough handling other huge
transitions like Perl 5.12, so by the time we got our own slot, we were well
into Summer.

With libnotify done in August, it was time to get our hands dirty with
more exciting stuff, like getting Nautilus in testing. This meant bumping a
soname and requiring all packages providing Nautilus extensions to migrate
to GTK+3.0, or drop the extension entirely, as you can’t mix GTK+2.0 and
GTK+3.0 symbols in the same process. However, in GNOME 3.0, automounting
code had moved from Nautilus to gnome-settings-daemon, so in order to not
break filesystem automounting in testing for an unreasonable amount of time,
both Nautilus and g-s-d needed to go in at the same time. The fun thing is
that g-s-d dragged glib2.0, gvfs, gnome-control-center, gdm3, gnome-media,
gnome-session and gnome-panel into the equation, so this transition needed
extra planning and a lot more work than initially expected: migrating all
nautilus extensions, plus ensuring all Panel applets had migrated to GTK+3.0
and the new libpanel-applet-4 interface. In short, this was the
monster transition
we were trying to avoid.

By the time all this mess was sorted out, GNOME 3.2 had been released,
and for what users said, it was a lot better than 3.0. We still had
no more than a few bits and pieces of 3.0 in testing, and we were working
hard to get 3.0 in wheezy. With all the excitement around 3.2, at times it
was difficult to explain outsiders why we were beating a dead 3.0 horse…
Going back to our huge transition, it was just a matter of time before all
the packages would be built and be ready to enter, on the same run, in
testing.

A few weeks later, in early November and after several rounds of
mass-bug-filings, fixing unrelated FTBFS, many NMUs, package removal
requests and dealing with any possible problem that could block our
transition, everything seemed to be set, and our release team magicians had
everything in place for the big magic to happen. However, our
first clash
with the rest of Debian happened a few hours before our victory, in the form
of an unannounced ruby-gnome2 upload which resetted the count for everyone.
It was fun to see the release team trying all sorts of black magic in an
attempt to mitigate the damage. Fortunately, after a few tries they managed
to fool britney (the script that handles package transitions from unstable
to testing) somehow, and the hardest part of the job was done with just one
day of delay.

At last, the core of GNOME 3 was in testing, and testing users found soon
after. The rest of the week saw a cascade of hate posts against GNOME 3 in
Planet Debian, and personally I
didn’t find that especially motivating to keep on working on the rest of
GNOME bits. With experimental clear of GNOME 3.0 stuff, we finally were able
to focus on packaging whatever GNOME 3.2 components were not already done,
and preparing for what should be a plain simple transition of GNOME 3.0 to
3.2.

After our share of wait for a transition slot, as Perl 5.14, ICU and
OpenSSL were in the line before us, and after dealing with a minor tracker
0.12 transition, we were ready for our next episode:
evolution-data-server.

At first sight, we thought this would be a lot easier, but it still
got a bit hairy
due to evo-data-server massive soname bumps. We were
given our slot
just before Christmas, after a few weeks of wait for others to finish their
migration rounds, and most of the pack entered wheezy a few days before the
new year.

No rejoicing, though, as GNOME Shell 3.2 didn’t make it. First, we
discovered it was FTBFS on kFreeBSD architectures, as NetworkManager had
been promoted from optional to required, for apparently no good reason,
leaving the BSD world in the cold, including our exotic GNU/kFreeBSD
architectures. Now, let’s clarify that I’m a supporter of the Debian
kFreeBSD architectures and was really happy to see it accepted as a
technology preview in squeeze. However, as you know, GNOME Shell currently
requires hardware acceleration to run, a requirement hardly met in kFreeBSD,
unless you’re using a DRI1 X driver. We seriously doubted anyone had
ever ran a GNOME 3 session on kfreebsd-*. However, if it didn’t
build, it was a blocker bug for GNOME Shell. We considered creating
different meta-packages for kFreeBSD architectures, to conclude it’d be a
mess, so our awesome Michael Biebl ended up cooking up a patch that restored
the ability to build the Shell without NetworkManager support.

With this out of our way, we just needed to upload Michael’s fix and
watch the buildds do their part of the job. Or maybe not?

Enter Iceweasel 9.

In parallel, and with incredible bad timing, Iceweasel 9.0 was uploaded
to Debian the very same day it was released by Mozilla. Again, it greeted us
with a nasty surprise: yet another mozjs API change, which made gjs FTBFS,
which meant our kFreeBSD fixes would be unusable until someone who knew Gjs’
internals well enough bit the bullet and worked around the new API changes.
Again, Michael Biebl tried to be our saviour, but unfortunately wasn’t able
to fix all the problems, so we tried to focus on plan B.

Mozilla had released a fork of the mozjs that is included in Firefox, so
that embedders would have a bit less of a hard time with these recurrent API
changes. This was based on Firefox 4, and was already being packaged by
Ubuntu. Gjs would build using this older version just fine, so we just
needed to get it in Debian as soon as possible. We just needed to find a
sucke^Wvolunteer that would be inclined to maintain the beast. Only after a
few weeks we managed to get Chris Coulson, the Ubuntu packager, to maintain
the package directly through the Debian archive via package syncs. However,
his package had only been auto-compiled in the three Ubuntu architectures,
that is amd64, armel and i386. It’s late January 2012, and we’ve been
fighting this war for 10 months.

After getting some help from Michael to get the new package in shape for
Debian standards, we were excited to sponsor it for Chris. Duh, after a few
days in the NEW fridge, it was rejected by the ftp-masters. The license
statement was missing quite a few details, so I went ahead and sacrificed a
few hours of my copious free time to get this sorted out. A few days later,
mozjs was accepted, but the result was horrible. It was
very red.
mozjs didn’t build on half of our targets.

Mike Hommey was quick to
file a bug
and point us to the most obvious fuckups. As he had dealt with this in the
past as the Iceweasel maintainer, all of these issues were fixed and patches
were ready to be applied verbatim or with minimal changes to our sources.
With mozjs finally built successfully (although with
severe problems on ia64),
we were finally able to rebuild Gjs against it, upload GNOME Shell with our
kFreeBSD fixes and wait until today for this mess to be over. Whew.

I can’t say I’ve enjoyed all the stages of this ride. Some bumps on the
road were clearly there to test our patience, but it has helped me get back
in touch with non-leaf GNOME packaging, which was all I was doing for a
while due to being super-busy lately with studies. It also reminds me of the
privilege of working side by side with some awesome people, not only Joss,
Michael, Sjoerd, Laurent or Gustavo, to name just a few Debian GNOME team
members, but also the receptive release team members like Julien or Cyril,
and NEW-processing record-breaking ftp-master Luca. Without them, we might
be trying to figure out the Nautilus transition since last Summer.

The following is a quick HOWTO for the brave Debian users who want to
upgrade to GNOME 3. Assuming you have an up to date system running sid, and
experimental listed in your APT sources, perform the following complicated
steps to end up having a functional GNOME 3 desktop:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

Thanks go to Joss for putting together new GNOME 3 meta-packages, and
the rest of the Debian GNOME people for months of hard planning and packaging
work, and painful testing transition handling.

Before you ask, yeah, not all of GNOME 3.x is in unstable yet, but will
soon be, as precedent
transitions start clearing
the way. And yeah, GNOME 3.2 will come just after the two remaining package
sets enter testing. To compensate, you'll find that you have some GNOME leaf
packages pending an upgrade to 3.2.0-1 while you read this.

3 months ago, I was positive I would be attending
DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, but as
the time to buy tickets and plan the trip came closer, I began to realise I
don't have lots and lots of vacation, and I probably prefer spending them
doing something that absolutelyrocks my world. I've
always enjoyed the Debian conferences when I've been lucky to be there, but
last year's experience in the Pyrenees was nothing a DebConf can compare to,
and I've decided to spend time seeking similar experiences this summer.

With much regret, because I love meeting the wonderful people that make up
Debian and DebConfs, I have to say that after all and once again, I won't make
it.